Chris again this week. Less fanfare and sparkly new board photos, more hard slog chasing down bugs on the new boards. The new charging circuit for the boards isn't playing very nicely with the existing battery protection circuit. We think we have traced the issue and will hopefully we'll soon have a version 2 V2 board ready to go.

Connected to this has been the ongoing issue of updating the DoES relfow oven, Florence. Nothing particularly exciting in a technical sense, we added a new temperature sensor and cailbrated the new firmware. It feels weeknote worthy though because these updates to off the shelf kit have relied on the shared work of people I've never met who bumped up against the same problems we were having. It's how we work at MCQN and how DoES is run, and proabably perfectly normal to most people who read these weekenotes. It's good sometimes to remember the wider community we're part of.

I've also been looking at a sound reactive demo of the V1 boards for the Merseyside Cycling Campaign AGM at DoES on Saturday 25th Feb. We've looked at sound reactive uses for My Baby's got LED before, but using signals generated on other machines. With this application we're taking an audio line in and creating the effects on board. Using UDP the effects can then be synchronised across all bikes in the Peloton. Syncronisation is a feature of these boards I'm keen to exploit more. It needs a bike mounted router solution to provide a network to connect devices, but I think it will make for impressive effects.

Logic analayser trace of communication between an ESP and Arduino.

This week Adrian has been getting an ESP32 microcontroller to program an Arduino. That involved a lot more wielding of logic analyzers and oscilloscopes than he'd have liked, thanks to some peculiarities in the particular hardware for this project. Thankfully he's made it out into the sunlit uplands of software and protocol implementation; and he's the sort of weirdo where reading protocol definitions for the STK500v2 firmware procedure is classed as "sunlit uplands".

There's a free MCQN coaster for the first person to correctly identify what's happening in the trace above. Answers on whatever the twenty first century equivalent of a postcard is.